Jack Shafer says let’s watch as the press corps battles its performance anxiety:

[I]f Obama wins, these scribes know that they’ll be facing the toughest assignment of their careers. They’ve all oversubscribed to the notion that Obama’s candidacy is momentous, without parallel, and earth-shattering, so they can’t file garden-variety pieces about the “winds of change” blowing through Washington. They’re convinced that not only the whole world will be reading but that historians will be drawing on their words. Will what I write be worthy of this moment in time? they’re asking themselves. It’s a perfect prescription for performance anxiety.

Howard Kurtz on journalists naming the 44th president:

Many pundits and publications seem so certain of a big Democratic win that they’re exploring the intricacies of an Obama administration and whether the party will have a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate.

“If the mainstream media are wrong about Obama and the voters pull a Truman, that is going to be the end of whatever shred of credibility they have left,” says Tobe Berkovitz, associate dean of Boston University’s College of Communication. […]

Given mounting signs of the Democratic nominee’s strength in key battleground states, he says, “we’re not crazy to think it’s all going Obama’s way.” But, [Slate correspondent John] Dickerson says, “we’ve seen how this can go horribly wrong when you call the thing too early, and voters find it offensive when journalists skip over the event the voters are supposed to be taking part in.”